Dallas: Freddie King gravesite

Blues musician Freddie King was born Freddie Christian near Gilmer, Texas, on September 3, 1934. He died in Dallas on December 28, 1976, of bleeding ulcers and pancreatitis at the age of 42. King’s gravesite is located in Sparkman/Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas.

If you’ve spent any time in a Texas blues club, you’ve heard not only T-Bone Walker, but Freddie King, whose influence goes beyond notes, style and material. The “Texas Cannonball” is there in the stinging leads that pierce precaution and in the low-slung blues breakers that remind everyone to tip the waitress or bartender. King’s been dead since 1976, the victim of acute pancreatitis at age 42, yet he’s still alive in the growling defiance of last-call favorite “Goin’ Down.” When King sang “Have you ever loved a woman, so much that you tremble in pain?,” you could be certain that this huge, soulful man had, so it was easier to admit that so had you. Like the comfort zone marked by the smell of good barbecue, the spirit of Freddie King (or “Freddy,” as it was spelled in the early years) engulfs blues joints. He practically stamped the walls with his outline, so massive was his stage presence in form and function.

“When he was alive, he was the most alive human being you’ve ever seen,” said Eddie Wilson of the Armadillo World Headquarters, which came to be known as “The House That Freddie Built.” He played the club for a 50/50 split and never asked for more, even after he was selling it out. “He just seemed so young and healthy even a few months before he passed away,” said Wilson.

Texas blues is ’bout loving all kinds of music with guts, whether it’s country, jazz or R&B, and it’s ’bout respecting the past while blazing new trails. Although T-Bone invented electric blues, it was Freddie who revved it up for the rock crowd with his stinging, right-hand attack. Moving from Texas to Chicago with his family at age 16, his hero Muddy Waters would sneak him in through the side door of Club Zanzibar. Muddy’s guitarist Jimmy Rogers showed Freddie how to use a plastic thumbpick and metal fingerpick to give an urban edge to his Texas blues. Eddie Taylor (Jimmy Reed) was another Chicago guy who gathered the big boy from Texas under his big wing. Albert Collins, Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy were Freddie’s contemporaries and close friends.

“I picked up the style between Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters,” King told Living Blues magazine in the early ‘70s. “That in-between style…I play country and city.”

King merged the most vibrant characteristics of Delta, Texas and Chicago styles and became the biggest guitar hero of the mid-60s British blues revivalists. John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, Peter Green and the rest of the longhaired blues set loved this intense “Country Boy” and talked him up to the point that King’s 1966 tour of England was sold out every night. When Freddie hit a note, it couldn’t be hit with more feeling, but guitar players tried their best and a couple came close.

Born Freddy Christian in Gilmer in 1934, he took his mother Ella’s maiden name King for its greater blues connotation. She and her brother Leon King taught Freddie the guitar at age six. His first musical idol was Louis Jordan, whose solos on the alto sax King copied on guitar. King played a Les Paul goldtop in the ‘50s, including his first 1956 debut on Chicago’s El-Bee label, and some recordings backing Howlin’ Wolf. But in the ‘60s he switched to the big, red, Gibson ES-355 that he’s best known for today.

During a 20-year recording career, King registered only one Top 40 hit, when “Hide Away” peaked at No. 29 on the Billboard singles chart in 1961. But he was a “Sen-Say-Shun”  at hippie rock clubs all over the United States, from the Fillmore East to the Fillmore West.

Excerpted from All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music (North Texas Lives of Musician Series) by Michael Cocoran, available in paperback and Kindle editions.